Crime & Punishment

Or pay a ransom? Many of us honor ransoms, you know......and he had lots of time to search and see if the guys bumping him were Honorable Internet Space Pirates.........

I think CCP's definition of 'excessive' is more in the line of 'following a single player around for days, bumping and ganking anything that he flies making it impossible for him to do anything'. Not bumping someone for just an hour while setting up your gank fleet.

Obviously, OP put too many eggs in one basket and freighter bumping/ganking is perfectly legal. However, I tend to think that at some point, an hour, 3 hours, I don't know how long, but at some point this becomes harassment. If I have to stay logged on an extra 4 hours because of a noob ship bumping me, that's just ridiculous.

My understanding is that a specific practice is deemed an exploit. Intentionally bumping a freighter isn't an expoit. Ganking a freighter isn't an exploit.

Bumping a freighter for great lengths of time and only engaging him criminally AFTER he logs of (when trying to enter e-warp), then scanning him down off the gate and ganking him in the next 15 minutes is considered an exploit.

The part where the exploit comes in is where you intentionally wait for the target to log off and then engage once he is out of game to start the 15 min log off timer. My understanding is the 'engage only after the target leaves the game' is the offensive part. It makes sense that intentionally engagings someone not in game is not an approved game mechanic.

Historically doing things that are dependant on the other player disconnecting are seen as 'bad'. If the real world breaks your connection (be it a hardware, software, continuity of power OR real life commitment) then you have left the game and are not elligible to be engaged/ganked or whatever.

Bumping a guy until he intentionally logs off (I see this as surrendering) and then killing him to me seems legit, BUT as always proving the reason someone left the game is not possible, SO engaging on this thin slice of play know as post log off has defaulted to exploit.

Why do it this way instead of just ganking the freighter on the gate?? It gets the loot scooper off the gate so that when he loots and gets a suspect flag he has a margin of safety from all the other folks in eve that may now shoot him. Man up gankers. The target was man enough to undock a 25 bil isk freighter - you should be man enough to scoop the loot on a gate instead of wimping out and using the e-warp to keep you RELATIVELY SAFE.

tl;dr: you got owned and you want CCP to make you whole because who said EVE is supposed to be challenging?

4 hours to call for help, help that could come in all kinds of forms, reppers, webbers, ecm boats. With time like that it doesn't even matter you don't have anyone to batphone in, you have a good chance of asking locals to help you out, hire mercenaries or whatever.

There will always be grey areas however and as CCP has shown in the past, they judge on a case to case basis in those. What happened to OP seems perfectly legit to me however.

You both kinda answer each others questions here. The reason for the bumping (beyond keeping the Freighter out of alignment), has little to do with looting (any random looter with a brain will see whats going on, and follow the bumping, not being on gate makes no difference here), it is to bump the future gank target out of range of the Concord spawn generated by the original aggression. The bumper gets the target out of alignment, the sacrificial aggressor shoots the target, gets Concorded, and starts the aggression timer to prevent logoff, then the bumper can use the 15 minute window to get the target as far as possible from the Concord spawn, so when the gank squad engage, the Concord spawn either has to warp to the gank site, or an entirely new spawn pops up.

That's where you are missing the point - the gankers are not trying to make someone log off; whether they log off or not is immaterial, the noob ship getting aggression is in case the target logs off. And getting aggression would always be best done before the pilot logs off anyway, because unlike warping to a gate/station/etc, an ewarp can be in any direction, and if the noobship waits until after the logoff, if the bumper is really unlucky, he might be actually bumping in the direction of the ewarp, and the prize is lost before aggression can be made. And I wasnt implying the noobship was the bumper, as you say, that would be dumb (the OP mentioned a Mach, which is the ideal bumping ship).

As I mentioned in my previous post (and this is how its worked every time I've been involved in the gank), the bumping solves the double purpose of keeping the ship from warping away (to a specific safe destination), and moving them away from the site of the original Concord spawn. Therefore, there is no need for forcing the target to ewarp away, as a bumping Mach can easily coast the target the 150+km away from Concord needed to stop the initial spawn interfereing in the gank. Don't get me wrong, if the target has logged off with aggression, it's often worthwhile to let the ewarp go through (although, unless the gank squad has a prober in system, this is risky, since if the target cant be probed fast enough, the target might be trying to log off, then straight back in hoping to shake the bumper) as this solves the spawn problem, but is by no means part of the standard procedure.

Long story short - staying logged on is not, in and of itself, going to save you from a gank-in-progress (although, actions you can take while logged on may do).

So you admit there were ways to deal with it, you just didn't think of them.

As another idea, you could have transferred some of the items to a corpmate by jettisoning them. Your corpie almost certainly would have gotten them before the enemies if you told him beforehand.

FWIW, Concord warps one fleet for each ganker. If there is a Concord fleet next to the frieghter from the noob ship aggression, that means that only one of the ultimate gank squad will have a very fast Concord response. The rest will have to wait until their personal Concord fleets either spawn or warp to the location.